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Monitor website performance in a dashboard

When website performance slows down, knowing whether the issue is occurring at the
application or network-level can save you troubleshooting time. In the ExtraHop system, a
dashboard is an effective tool for monitoring real-time data, and for identifying and
troubleshooting issues.

In this walkthrough, you will build a dashboard to help answer the following questions about
website performance in your network environment:

How many requests are clients sending to my web servers?

Are my web servers working properly?

Is network availability affecting web applications?

Is my network unusually slow?

Prerequisites

Familiarize yourself with the concepts in this walkthrough by reading the Dashboards concepts topic.

You must have access to an ExtraHop Discover appliance with a user account that has limited
or full write
privileges.

Your ExtraHop appliance must also have network data with web server traffic. If you do not
have access to web server data, you can perform this walkthrough in the ExtraHop demo.

Create a dashboard

When you create a new dashboard, the workspace opens in an editable layout mode with
a single region and two empty widgets: a chart and a text box.

Log into the ExtraHop Web UI.

On the Dashboard page, click the command menu in the upper right
corner and select Create Dashboard to create an empty
dashboard.

Type a name for your dashboard title in the Title field.
For this walkthrough, type Website performance.

Click Create.

Configure your first chart

Your new dashboard contains an empty chart, which you will configure to display the
total number of HTTP requests that were sent to your web servers. This step will
help you understand how web transactions might affect website performance.

You will add more charts later, but these initial steps will show you how to add data
to a chart by first selecting a metric source and then adding a metric in the Metric
Explorer.

Click the empty chart widget in your newly created dashboard to launch the
Metric Explorer.

Click Add Source and type All
Activity. All Activity application is a metric source that is
available by default to all users and contains metrics about all of the devices
discovered on your network.

Tip:

If there is a specific web server that you want to monitor,
type the name of the server into the search field instead of All Activity,
and select that server as your source.

Select All Activity from the list. After you make your
selection, a field appears for you to select a metric that is associated with
this source.

Begin typing HTTP requests to filter this metric from
all of the available metrics, and then select HTTP
Requests.

Select the Value chart type from the bottom of the
Metric Explorer. The preview pane immediately displays the number of HTTP
requests sent to web servers on your network that have occurred during the last
30 minutes.

Click Save to return to your dashboard.

The following figure displays the chart configuration settings.

Because dashboards are often shared with members of a network
team, you can add explanatory text boxes next to your charts. For this walkthrough,
however, we will not be adding text, and you can delete the text box by completing
the following steps:

Click the command menu in the upper right corner of the text box
widget and select Delete.

Click Delete Widget.

Customize the dashboard layout

One of the powers of dashboards lies in compiling multiple charts into a single page,
giving you many views of your network traffic. In this section, you’ll learn how to customize
the layout of your dashboard by adding and arranging more charts.

When the dashboard is in layout mode, all dashboard components (regions and widgets) are
available for you to drag and drop from the bottom of the dashboard page.

Drag the corner of the dashboard workspace to make room for additional charts.

Drag a chart widget from the bottom of the dashboard to the empty area of the top region
where the text box previously was.

Note:

If there is overlap, dashboard components outline
in red, and you must click and drag the sides of the widgets and regions to make
room.

Drag a new region to the dashboard.

Drag two more chart widgets into the new region.

In each region header, click Rename to type a unique name for
each region. For this walkthrough, rename the top region to Web and
the bottom region to Network.

Add more HTTP metrics to your dashboard

Repeat the instructions provided earlier to configure the
new empty charts. Continue to set your source to All Activity. This source ensures that all
of the metrics you are observing are related to the same set of web servers.

The tables below outline the selections you should make for the metrics and chart types in
each chart.

Charts in the Web region

Chart 1: Determine how many requests your web
servers are receiving. The value chart you already built lets you glance at the total number
of client HTTP requests sent to your web servers.

Chart 2: Determine if web servers
working properly. The line & column chart shows you the relationship of 500-level status
codes (server unavailability errors) to web transactions over time.

What to Configure

What to Select

Source

All Activity

Metrics

HTTP Responses

HTTP Errors

Chart type

Line & column

Select Display as columns on the HTTP Errors
metric.

Charts in the Network region

Chart 1: Determine if network
availability is affecting web applications. A line chart will display how long it takes for
data to cross the network (HTTP Round Trip Time). You will want to see the mean (50th
percentile) and 95th percentile values for this metric, which requires adding the metric
twice, as displayed in the following figure:

What to Configure

What to Select

Source

All Activity

Metrics

Add HTTP Round Trip Time twice

Add a 95th percentile line:

Click Mean underneath one of the metric
names.

Select Percentile from the drop-down list.

Type 95 and click
Save.

Chart type

Line

Chart 2: Determine if the network is unusually slow. The retransmission timeout (RTO) metric helps to
identify packet loss and to locate the congested links. Because the combination of HTTP
request and response RTOs can contribute to a slow website, correlate network retransmission
timeouts to website performance in an area chart, as displayed in the following
figure:

What to Configure

What to Select

Source

All Activity

Metrics

HTTP Request RTOs

HTTP Response RTOs

Chart type

Area

Monitor your website performance

After you have completed configuring all of the charts, click Exit Layout
Mode. Your dashboard should look similar to the following figure. However,
data in your dashboard charts will look different because your dashboard is reflecting the
activity occuring on your network.

Now you can monitor and assess your website performance on a
regular basis.

Share your dashboard

Share this dashboard with other teams to help you keep an eye on website performance
and identify issues that are potentially occurring in an application or on the
network.

In the upper right corner of the dashboard, in the navigation bar, click the
command menu .

Click Share.

Select All users can view, only specified users can edit
to provide all ExtraHop users at your organization with dashboard viewing
privileges.

Note:

You can restrict dashboard access to specific users. For more information,
see the Share a dashboard.